1 Treffer

Among the Latin Church Fathers, there was a widespread understanding of divine eternity as timelessness, while time as we know it was regarded to be relative to the existence of material or at any rate mutable entities, to, that is, the existence of creatures. Now if we suppose that God has also created (or might have created) purely spiritual beings or an initially unformed matter, one may wonder how these relate to time – to our time – as well as to the timeless eternity of their creator. This is an edition, translation and extended commentary of two short texts by Ralph of Battle, an intimate of Saint Anselm, concerning this very problem: a “sentence” from Jerome, and a treatise setting out a theological position which according to Ralph some have taken in the wake of Jerome’s testimony. Ralph’s rendering of the position in question is contextualized by looking at his other works and comparing Ralph’s and Jerome’s lines of reasoning to that of Augustine, who considers the issue in various works without, however, feeling able to settle the matter conclusively.